Software upgrades completed (01/07) - report problems here

[Steve St.Laurent]

A few security vulnerabilities were found in the version of vBulletin and PHP that we were running recently. We do our best to be pro-active on potential vulnerabilities so once I was aware of the issues (yesterday) I discussed it with Robin and we decided to make the changes last night.



I had the entire site down from approximately 1:30 am until 3:30 am eastern time - if you tried to access the site during that time period you would have either gotten error messages or no response at all. I was upgrading PHP and Apache at that time and without those running there's nothing to respond to your requests. Also, many things tie into those programs so it is a complicated upgrade process which is why you may have gotten errors at times.



Starting around 5:00 am eastern I took the forums off line to install an upgraded version of vBulletin as well. We were running on vBulletin v3. 0. 3 which was the most current release up to January 2nd when v3. 0. 4 was released. They released that version to take care of a fairly large list of bugs they had discovered and primarily to close up some security vulnerabilities that had been discovered. Yesterday they discovered yet another vulnerability in 3. 0. 4 and released v3. 0. 5 last night around 3:30am. We are now running on v3. 0. 5. Normally I do not implement new versions when they are first available so that someone else can be the guinea pig. However, since this dealt with security vulnerabilities which could bring the site down I decided it was worth the effort.



Because of the major number of changes that have been made I fully expect that we will run into some bugs. Please report any you might find here and I will do my best to take care of them in a timely manner.



-Steve St. Laurent

Webmaster

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

I just finished the last of the upgrades. Now I'm going to bed! I'll check in later this morning for any issues that have come up.

 

[rweis]

Being one who does this (Administrator) for a University, I can not say what a HECK OF A JOB you are doing. It is really tough to work all day THEN work all night as well.



I can not emphasize how grateful I am, it is not I, in your shoes.



You have to walk a year in an Administrators shoes to REALLY understand what it takes to run a system.



You can not be disgusted at cold chili at 0200 either, lol.



Bob Weis

 

[bulabula]

Nice job, Steve. It seems to load quicker too.

 

[wcjp]

Thanks for the great site.



My problem is with "View New Posts". I'm unable to do so. I'm using Netscape 6.













vBulletin Message



Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms.

 

[amsoilman]

Steve,

You simply AMAZE me!! You are doing an outstanding job with this site, and I can't thank you enough!



Wayne

amsoilman

 

[Joe Mc]

Steve St. Laurent, a. k. a. Wyle Coyote - Super Genius!



Thanks for all you do in keeping this site working well, safe and healthy for all of us.

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

wcjp - does it never work for you or you are part way through viewing new posts when you get that message?

 

[bmoeller]

a. k. a. Wyle Coyote - Super Genius!

I'm not sure that is a compliment. :-laf Coyote never gets the job done. Steve does.



Thanks for all the hard work, Steve.

 

[kbunn]

I get when part way through viewing the posts, seems to be a time thing.

 

[TPCDrafting]

Steve, nice work once again

You wanted bugs:



I have IE 6. 0. 29..... XP SP2 and have it set to alert me every time a site trys to plant a cookie in my system. Annoying is an understatement. Anyway I clicked on a thread and IE said that cwm. ragesofinsanity.com wanted to give me a cookie. Not a big deal, but I didn't think you allowed that on this site.

 

[TPCDrafting]

Evidentally an old thread, but this is the one that did it:



https://www.turbodieselregister.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6282

 

[Gary - K7GLD]

I've had a couple of pop-up ads hit me too while in this board - never had that happen before the upgrade. Not a big deal, but worth mentioning - I'll keep my eyes open to see if it continues.

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

kbunn - see this post in the FAQ - https://www.turbodieselregister.com/forums/showthread.php?t=119538



TPC - I'll look at that thread as soon as possible. There shouldn't be anything on here that does that. Most likely your dealing with a spybot that is doing that from your own system.



Same thing with any popup ads - they aren't coming from here. I recommend running ad aware ( http://www.lavasoft.com ) and spybot s & d ( http://www.safer-networking.org ) on a weekly basis to clean your system off. I have recently found some that even those didn't find and spy sweeper did - http://www.spysweeper.com . I am still evaluating spy sweeper for it's effectiveness but it's worth a shot too - you have to pay for it but they have a 30 day trial.

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

TPC - I've looked at every post in that thread on a database level and there isn't anything there that could possibly install a cookie. You have something on your PC that tried to do that. Try running the spybot removers (all 3) that I listed above and you probably won't see it again. Spybots are a BIG problem that the industry is just now starting to come to terms with.

 

[jwaldron]

Clock

Is It Right

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

It's off by about 10 minutes right now - I have to adjust it periodically. You probably have not set your time zone so your seeing the time in GMT. Pull down the discussion forums menu to user control panel and then click on edit options on the left - you can set your time zone and whether you go on daylight savings or not.

 

[Sageair]

Steve Thanks for all your hard work. How did you ever find the time to have a second chilld? Or are you a microsecond kind of guy?

 

[John - K5AWO]

One Awesome Job!

Steve,



Your endeavors never cease to amaze me. And, like Bob, having been there, I fully know the stress and effort to make it right and trying to stay ahead of the baddies.



Kudoes for yet another job well done. I haven't found any bugs yet, but only been on the new software for maybe 15 minutes.



Will say, it is loading much faster. Will time it tomorrow when I have more time. Beddie bye all...

 

[1stgen4evr]

Possible problem

I have a couple of TDR correspondents who mention some problems posting but for my situation, I seem to not have gotten through on inquirys regarding classifieds. I emailed five or six questions to folks and didn't get a single answer. This may be totally unrelated. Nothing else to report. Thanks for the good work.



James